Railsea

PART VII

BLOOD RABBIT

(Lepus cruentus)

Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.

Credit: China Mieville (illustration credit 7.1)

SEVENTY-THREE

NONE OF YOU HAVE TO,” SHAM SAID. “I DON’T EVEN expect any of you to. I don’t deserve you to. But yeah, of course I’m going on.” He smiled. “With them.”

Caldera smiled, too. Thanks, she mouthed at him.

Of those Bajjer who had stuck the journey this far, most took their own leave after the Fight of the Rescue of the Siblings Shroake. Now the Shroakes were—temporarily at least—saved. A quest, for something that lay beyond pictures the Bajjer & their companions had never even seen, was the only reason to go on. Most of the Bajjer had little interest in quests. There were exceptions. & there were those insistent on revenge on the Manihiki navy train the Shroakes told them was close.

The crew of the Medes, that had once been a moletrain & was now who- knew-quite-what, having performed the rescue they had promised to Sham, were no more obliged to continue than the Bajjer. The captain, if such she still was, fiddled with her tracker.

“I’ll stick with you a bit, though, if you’ve no objection,” Sirocco said.

“Ah,” said Vurinam. “We’re so near now. Why not let’s just see what we find?”

He spoke for the bulk of the crew. Those for whom he did not joined the mass of Bajjer carts, complaining at the unorthodox conveyance, to start a slow way back east to the known world.

“Captain Naphi?” Sham said. She looked up, startled. She still prodded at her tracking mechanism, with a tool extruded from her arm. The one her crew now called her artificial artificial one.

“Should throw that bloody thing to Mocker-Jack,” Fremlo muttered.

“I stay with my train,” Naphi said at last, turned back to what she was doing. So there was that.

Those heading back & those going on separated with camaraderie & without rancour, waving as they parted. The flotilla of sailtrains scattered back towards distant mountains.

The investigators argued over their clue-map. “What’s this sound like?” someone would shout, & yellingly repeat the description Sham, with muttered help from the captain, had given. Then debates: that looks like such-&-such a place; no, you’re mad, that’s wossname; & wasn’t there a story about these or those hills? Bajjer scout-carts would beetle off in candidate directions, until forward motion was agreed, & the Medes, the remaining Bajjer vehicles & the Pinschon hauled on.

Dero & Caldera watched their own train disappear behind them. Their rolling-stock home for so long. “You had to,” Sham said quietly. “It was falling apart.” For a while, neither Shroake said a word.

“Thanks for letting us carry on,” Dero said at last. “For using your train.” Ain’t really mine, Sham thought. He left the Shroakes to their goodbye.

The captain, at the Medes’s rear, intent in her strange work, gave a hm of triumph. Daybe veered overhead. The air so far out seemed to confuse it. It arced, abruptly curved back towards the train. Heading not straight for Sham but for the last carriage. Circled Captain Naphi, standing staring back the way they had come, towards her lost philosophy, like some befuddled antifigurehead. No one bothered her. No one minded her in her backwards command. She fiddled with her machine while the bat circled.

There was salvage even here, & once or twice they saw the remnants of ruined trains. They made slow progress—there were days when they decided they’d taken a wrong move, & the whole group would reverse, or grind on to where junctions allowed them to turn. But they grew better at unpicking clues. Their false starts grew fewer.

They had, after all, a method for knowing when they’d gone right: with a hush & increasingly uncanny sense, Sham would find himself, with a sudden turn of the rails, staring at an exact scene he remembered from the screen. Only the sky would be different, the clouds & upsky coilings. They progressed through old pictures.

The farther they travelled beyond the trade routes of the railsea, filling in specifics on charts marked only with the vaguest rumours, the sparser the railsea, the larger the stretches of unbroken land, the fewer the rails. There was a winnowing of iron possibilities.

The other thing that made them certain they were en route to something hidden, at the edge of the railsea & therefore of the world, was that they were harassed by angels.

SEVENTY-FOUR

IT WAS NIGHT. STILL THEY TRAVELLED. A BAJJER SCOUT reported something in the distance. The explorers woke as the air shook.

“What …?”

“Is that …?”

They came on deck, rubbing their eyes & looking up at the lights low in the sky. In came a flock of flying angels.

“Oh my Stonefaces,” Sham whispered.

The crew watched the air-chopping investigators. They could not make much out: swaying lights, reflections on recurved shells, stars glimpsed through their shimmering. Fables! The watchers at the edge of the world. The heralds of the godsquabble. Getterbirds, utterers in air. They had as many names as most holy things do.

The crew cringed, kept weapons in their hands, whispered to switchers to get ready, anticipating attack. Which did not come. At last the whirling-winged things scattered. Some back the way they had come, back towards the world’s edge, others east, & south.

“Where they going?” said Caldera. “If only we had a plane to see.”

Sham looked at her thoughtfully. “That we don’t,” he said. “But we do have something.”

He scaled the crow’s nest. Remember when I couldn’t do this? he thought. Into the gloom & freezing air. Telescope in hand, Sham waited. He looked for flying lights & considered. If he tried to think full-on about where he was, what he was doing, how he had got there, it was all a great deal too much. So he simply didn’t. Sham just thought of stories about what was ahead. The end of the world, ghostly money, endless sorrow. Sham strained his eyes.

It was not deep night. It was dark but not quite dark. The stars were hidden but not wholly. By sitting still & staring a long, long time, Sham could make out textures in the black. The edge of something, approaching. A horizon. That’s what it was. Dark on dark. A horizon that was definitely, without question, closer than it should be. He caught his breath.

Mountains, rocks, a split, gaps & foreshortened earth.

& then a rush, a whir of lights & another angel rushed into view. It roared around him, filling the